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<p>Assumption is that large studio strobes may take longer to reach max power, so 1/125" is safe bet. If you wan to to be sure, just test with different shutter speed - appropriate shutter speed will result in fully-lit frame, if you see part frame lit and the other isn't (depening on ambient lighting difference may be big or small), then shutter speed was too short.</p>

<p>For low-hight shots consider Manfrotto 55 NAT series - they can go as low as 7 or 11cm (don't remember exactly) with central column removed, excluding hight of the head. I have one which is 9 years old and find it adequate for low-angle shots. For fine adjustment geared Manfrotto 205 head is really great. When I've got this one I've basically stopped using ballhead (I shoot mostly architecture and landscapes).</p>

<p>Camera's "tungsten" light setting is around 3000-3200K whereas household bulbs are usually 2700-2800K. That's why you get yellow/orange tint on the photos. AWB doesn't seem to work well at extremeties. Get a piece of white paper, photo graycard or even better colorchecker and use it as reference to set custom WB. Keep in mind, that even with custom white balance you may not be happy with the colors. This is because indoors there's usually not that much light in the "cold" part of the spectrum, so colors start looking weird (but using colorchecker to create DNG camera profile for given light will give you better results than no profile and AWB).</p>

<p>Provided that your output device (monitor or printer+paper combo) is calibrated, you have two options: 1) tweak colors in post processing to your liking; or 2) get x-rite colorchecker and build custom DNG profile for your shooting conditions (building dual profile relieves you from making profiles every time light changes). I used first option for a long time until I got tired, so moved to option 2. Although results are not dead-on-spot they're close enough to my liking.</p>

<p>Haven't read manual of my DSLR in details, but I remember from EOS 3 days that the manual explicitly advised to cover the viewfinder for long exposures and that's why there is built-in fixture on the neckstrap that fits tightly onto the viewfinder (need to remove eyepiece) so it's always there when you need it.</p>

<p>perhaps the camera chooses smaller apperture because engineers are aware that lens performs better when stopped down? since you let the camera control two variables (iso and apperture), you shouldn't expect it to use the same strategy as you would choose.</p>

<p>While on bhphoto.com price for 1Ds MkIII is more or less the same as before, in Europe the price has dropped a lot - on amazon.de it cost now "only" 5099 EUR, and calumetphoto.de has it for 5899 (it used to be close to 7k EUR). There must be some reason.</p>

<p>thanks for the info, Patrick!</p>

<p>TN pannels can definetely be calibrated. I have SyncMaster 192N in the office, calibrated it with Spyder3Elite, it's reasonably accurate when comparing screen and print. On the other hand, when I calibrated 13" MacBook (2008 model, not MBP) I've noticed severe banding and also slight magenta tint. Then I've found that my MacBook screen is 6-bit pannel, not much you can do with picking up right colours using either colorimeter or eye-based calibration. Check what kind of screen your MBP has.</p>

<p>Patrick,</p>

<p>do you have some reference to a document or have you measured new iMac screen yourself to confirm that it could be set to 110 cd/m2? Also, do you know about black luminance range for new iMacs? On my 24" early 2009 model I don't get something around 0.4cd/m2 at best, which isn't so attractive when white luminance is at around 240-250 cd/m2. If new iMacs go down to 110cd/m2 in white luminance, but also decreasing black luminance to 0.2 cd/m2 then effectively contrast remains the same, i.e. too high compare to print.</p>

<p>It's ok in a way that it's reasonably accurate after profiling or calibration (I use Spyder3Elite). Calibration is limited to setting white point and white level. You cannot set black level (no controls, not even via DDC and third-party software), you cannot individually adjust bias/gain in each color channel, and the minimum white level is rather high (see http://www.photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00U0ZJ). When I leave native white point I get less (almost no) banding compare to setting it to 6500K.</p>

<p>$1200 won't buy you wide-angle TS-E (unless you hurry up and find Mk I of 24mm TS-E). If you get 45mm TS-E but you have 1.6x crop-factor camera, it becomes short telephoto which isn't very exciting for landscapes most of the time. It took me some while to develop natural habits for focusing with tilt for greater DOF, so don't expect magic there. But when you get grip on the focusing technique you'll be very pleased with the results when you'll be able to achieve DOF with only f/5.6 what otherwise couldn't be done without going f/22. Older 24mm TS-E (what I have) exhibits noticible fridging but that doesn't bother me on most real-world photos. If you can afford new 24mm TS-E, or (if you have crop-factor camera) 17mm TS-E, then by all means go for it instead of telephoto.</p>

<p>400mm alone (without extender) my not be sufficient for small birds, and with extender may render your auto-focus unusable (depending on your camera). For landscapes telephotos are more a special-case rather than general-use lenses.</p>

<p>If you want to limit yourself to photographying macro of plants and small bugs, 100mm 1:1 macro may be better choice for you.</p>

<p>/iLya</p>

<p>Ben,</p>

<p>have you tried Lightroom 3 Beta 2 from Adobe Labs? Adobe has supposedly rewritten a lot of code to better utilise multi-core hardware in Apple boxes.</p>

<p>Also, Lightroom is disk i/o intensive, if this is what limits your performance currently, you're unlikely to see significant speed gain from changing the horse. Are your images on internal or external drive? Getting external RAID5 disk array with gigabit connection (under 1000 EUR for 4 disk versions) may make bigger difference for you than changing CPU, graphics cards and operating system.</p>

<p>I find that for single person portrait using my 20D and 50mm f/1.4 the best apperture is between f/2.0 and f/3.2 at typical portrait distance. Provided that focus is done on the eyes, at f/2.0 you have barely enough DOF to cover from tip of the nose to the back of the head (some DOF is wasted in the front, but I want eyes sharpest possible). When photographying kids f/3.2 gives a bit more room for their spontaneous movements. Anything wider than f/2.0 may be not sufficient even to have both eyes sharp (if shooting at slight angle), and anything smalled than f/3.2 doesn't blur background sufficiently.</p>

<p>Keep in mind, amount of blur also depends on the distance separating subject and background. If at these appertures you're not satisfied with amount of blur, try moving subject more far from the background if room allows.</p>

<p>Although it's possible to temporarily switch ISO to 1600 or 3200, meter and go back to ISO 100 increasing exposure time 4 or 5 times it won't always work. In my short experience with 9-stop filter correct exposure with the filter was not always 9 stops longer than without filter, but sometimes it was 10 stops and sometimes 8 stops. Perhaps it depends on the spectrum of the scene since many ND filters are not truely ND (the one I used warmed up scenes slightly) and therefore exposure affected differently for different colors.</p>

<p>Besides metering problems, you still have to focus somehow and with 9-stop filter it's usually not feasible. So take filter off, focus/meter, put it back on, then shoot. Takes longer, but then your exposure time is long anyway :-)</p>

<p>Focusing at 1/3rd comes from the fact that aproximately 1/3rd of the acceptable sharpness is located in front of the focus plane and 2/3rds are located behind the focus plane. E.g if you focus at 4m distance, then objects at 4m will be in focus, while objects from 3m up to 6m will be acceptably sharp (you have to find out which apperture setting gives those numbers for given lens). Mind that this are only aproximate values, so you'll need to close down apperture a bit.</p>

<p>So in practical terms, once you've settled on nearest and farmost objects that you want sharp and figured out required apperture, you find a point aproximately 1/3rd away from nearest object (not from you!).</p>

<p>If you want to know more about it, have a look at Ansel Adams "Camera" book.</p>

<p>I have 430 flash, but always whish I'd have bought 580 instead. For bouncing light off 3m-high ceiling 430 isn't powerful enough to provide enough light for f/4 and smaller, and even for that I have to manually zoom flash to 105mm setting which makes light less pleasant compare to wider setting. Of course for straight-on lighting 430 is fairly enough, but then straight-on isn't pleasant by itself. So I'd recommend getting 580, which can also be used as wireless master later (430 can be only slave).</p>

<p>Patrick,</p>

<p>I was thinking about installing 'Shade", but isn't it doing the trick by modifying video card LUT? If so, then there will be two applications (Shade and Spyder3) overwriting each other changes.</p>

<p>Thank you all for responses!</p>

<p>I've just called Apple support and after 8 minutes of waiting queue and nearly 20 minutes of conversation the support person told me that luminance between 200 and 290cd/m2 is normal according to their tech specs. Curiously their public pages say that typical luminance is 300, so the values I got from support person are lower than what they advertise to public. From the way conversation proceeded I conclude that getting anything else from Apple support is unlikely, so the only thing I can do now is to increase light level in my room.</p>

<p>And on a side note, so much for advertised "free telephone support within first 90 days" - their support number is actually one of those with premium charge applied.</p>

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>as I wrote in <a href="../digital-darkroom-forum/00U0YE">previous post</a> , my attempt to get Eizo S2242W failed. I've ended up bringing home new and shining iMac 24" (make early 2009 according to the package). When I turned it on it became apparent that screen is way too bright for my comfort. I've ran System Update, then started calibrating it with Spyder3 Elite. The white luminance I've got initially was 300cd/m2 and even putting monitor brightness/backlight all the way down it's still whooping 209cd/m2. Not even talking about color accuracy, this brightness hurts my eyes after just half an hour working with the screen.</p>

<p>Have I got bad sample or is it "normal" for iMac to have such high luminance? I've searched the net and found people mentioning mostly 140-160 range as minimum they get on their iMac's, but posts date back a year or so. Those of you who have both new (latest) iMac and some hardware for calibration, what current/lowest luminance do you achieve?</p>

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>just wanted to share my experience last week with purchase of new monitor. I was longing for some quality wide-gamut monitor that would still fit my budget of 700 eur. Initial candidate was Eizo S2242W. Found local dealer that had them in stock, went there to test. Monitor was connected to Mac-mini via DVI, and I've ran Eizo-own monitor test (http://www.eizo.de/support/monitortest.html). Out of the box monitor exhibited very pronounced banding in darker half of all primary color and gray gradients. The salesman expressed surprise and said that it's probably because of using stock profile rather than custom built. He offered that I should come next day and he will have monitor calibrated with i1Display. I was sceptical that it would help but agreed nevertheless.</p>

<p>Next day monitor was calibrated/profiled to Gamma 2.2 and 6500K. Banding in red gradient was nearly gone, but in blue and green it was still clearly there. Worst, the gray gradient had ugly color rainbow effect with magenta and cyan showing up here and there. That was enough for me to walk away. Cannot say if it's general issue with this model or if particular sample was defective - they had only one in stock and haven't ran tests before. So in case you're thinking of getting S2242W consider testing it first in the store, or be sure you can return it and get money back.</p>

<p>46-50C idle temperature sounds high to me. This is similar to what I saw last winter on my Pentium 4 system when it was crashing under moderate load (BSOD & Co). It was hard to believe that applying thermal paste would be sufficient, yet it was (ok, along with vacuum-cleaning the box and dusting off the rest with compressed air) - after careful cleaning of the old paste with nail lack remover borrowed from my wife, and applying few bits of Arctic Silver. Now idle temperature is 32-34C and under even heavy load it doesn't go above 55-58C.</p>

<p>It's not that iPhoto doesn't work well with RAW, it's just it stores and looks for manipulations in place other than XMP stored by Camera Raw. For my wife I've configured iPhoto to work with Canon raw processor and that works well because Canon software stores manipulation instructions in the original file (it doesn't change raw data, just processing recipe). If you already have PS Elements, why not use it for organising your photos?</p>

<p>Don't think there was any problem with DoF as at such distance and f/5 18mm lens has significant DoF. It looks to me like combined effect of unsharpnes due to people moving slightly (1/60" isn't that short exposure) and sharpness added by flash exposure (which is much shorter). One option to try is to shoot in manual exposure mode and for selected apperture (depending on desired DoF) set shutter speed so that continuous light alone would produce 1/2 to 1 stop underexposed image, then set flash compensation so that flash is used as main source (effectively room light is then used as fill-light). This way effect of the blur due to motion should be reduced thanks to short flash duration.</p>

<p>Alec, I've suggested "Convert" because often if a lab has ICC profile for their printer, they expect images to be already in that profile so they don't need to do any conversion (else how should they know if you want Perceptual or Relative intent rendering). In my short experience red and blue have most noticible change of appearance between Perceptual and Relative conversions so if you let lab to choose conversion at random you don't have control what are they going to do (many labs just strip your ProPhoto RGB profile and treat image as an sRGB resulting in greenish tones). Besides, in my lab they charge extra if submitted image is not suitable for direct printing (not in their profile and not 8bpc). And it's not "assign" but "convert", and you do it at the very last stage right before packing images for delivery to the lab. You still save your working image in whatever your working RGB space is (AdobeRGB, ProPhoto RGB, sRGB).</p>

<p>So many variables, this is why I suggested to check with the lab what profile they expect images to be in or go with sRGB if unsure.</p>